What to Stream This Weekend

Five films told in multiple languages.

What to Stream This Weekend

Five films told in multiple languages.

Each week, Richard Brody picks a classic film, a modern film, an independent film, a foreign film, and a documentary for online viewing.

“A Better Life”

Photograph by Merrick Morton / Summit Entertainment / Everett

Hong Sang-soo’s “Claire’s Camera,” featuring dialogue in Korean, English, and French, opening this weekend (and Wes Anderson’s “Isle of
Dogs,” in English and Japanese, coming March 23rd), got me thinking
about other movies that feature multiple languages. Chris Weitz’s 2011
drama, “A Better Life,” is an extraordinarily detailed and impassioned
look at the life of an undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles. It’s also
the film that established Demián Bichir as a movie star. He plays Carlos
Galindo, a Mexican man who has a steady job as a gardener in the employ
of Blasco (Joaquín Cosio), another immigrant. When Blasco plans to
return to Mexico, he hopes to sell Carlos his truck, thereby allowing
him also to become a self-employed contractor. The scene in which Carlos
demurs—expressing his fear of deportation if he should be stopped for a
traffic ticket—exemplifies the surveillance horror that runs throughout
the film. Ultimately, Carlos does acquire the truck, it’s stolen, and he
and his teen-age son, Luis (José Julián), pursue the thief; but, far
from turning into an action thriller or a genre film, the quest lets
Weitz get further into the corners and the margins of American immigrant
life. The drama isn’t one of documentation or its absence; it’s one of
society at large, and the cruelly convenient self-deceptions on which
the failure of national policy and politics depends.

“The Great Dictator”

Photograph from Everett

It counts, too, when one of the languages in question is fictitious—made
up by the writer and director (who is also the star) for the purposes of
the film. The film, of course, is “The Great Dictator,” from 1940; the
multifaceted creator is Charlie Chaplin, who, besides being the total
potentate behind the scenes (he wrote, directed, and produced the film,
and owned the studio where it was shot), stars in a double role, as a
Jewish barber living in the Jewish ghetto in the fictitious country of
Tomania and as Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania, who decrees and
oversees the persecution of Jews in the country. Of course, it’s the
story of Hitler—and his relations with Mussolini, who is incarnated here
as a ludicrously bombastic pseudo-Italianate dictator named Napaloni
(played by Jack Oakie), from the country of Bacteria. With deep
political acumen, Chaplin traces the story back to the First World War,
in a long opening battle scene of a riotous comic absurdity that links
it to Chaplin’s trench-warfare comedy “Shoulder Arms” (1918). Appalled
and horrified by Hitler, Chaplin mocks the tyrant’s frantically
histrionic public rants at Nuremberg-style rallies by having Hynkel (who
speaks English in scenes with other actors) deliver them in a pidgin
German that’s as outrageously funny (“Democratzy schtunk! Liberty
schtunk! Freesprecken schtunk!”) as it is nonetheless terrifying.
(Actually, the movie features three languages—the signs on stores in the
Jewish neighborhood are written in another recently invented language,
Esperanto.)

“The Loneliest Planet”

Photograph by Inti Briones / IFC Films / Everett

It’s disheartening and astonishing that Julia Loktev hasn’t made a film
since “The Loneliest Planet,” in 2011, which builds its closely observed
drama around one of the most striking and painful—and historically
resonant—scenes in modern independent cinema. Hani Furstenberg plays
Nica, and Gael García Bernal plays Alex; they’re a young and
adventuresome American couple whose free-spirited travels through the
mountainous regions of the Republic of Georgia, at the boundary of
Europe and Asia, lead them into trouble. In towns and villages, they
experience rustic discomforts (the movie begins with Nica enduring the
chill of a hand-poured shower) and delight in the kitsch of an unhip
café. In the company of a rugged local guide named Dato (Bidzina
Gujabidze), they savor the picturesque charm of a shepherd’s flock, the
acrobatic dangers of a narrow climb over a rocky stream. Yet, further
off the grid, they have an altogether more menacing encounter, with
armed locals, which definitively changes the trip, their relationship,
and their lives. Loktev luxuriates, visually and dramatically, in the
intimacies shared and the experiences garnered in the course of an
adventuresome journey; she catches the bitter irony of the primal
emotions that arise in the unsheltered wild.

“Senso”

Photograph from Everett

The linguistic mesh of Luchino Visconti’s opulent and grandly
melodramatic 1954 historical drama “Senso” is woven tightly from the
start with the strands of politics and art. It’s set in 1866, in Venice,
which was occupied by the Austrian Army and fighting a guerrilla war of
liberation that, in the opening scene, plays out symbolically in an
opera house, an exemplary Italian setting. In the middle of a production
of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” at the conclusion of the celebrated aria “Di
quella pira,” which concludes with the line “To arms!,” Italians
demonstrate publicly in a call to oust the occupiers, including the
officers who swarm sociably about the theatre speaking German. As
violence threatens to break out, one Venetian aristocrat, Livia (Alida
Valli), tries to protect her brother (Massimo Girotti), a revolutionary
leader, from the oppressors. After the commotion, she finds herself face
to face with a dashing Austrian officer, Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley
Granger), and her attraction to him crashes against her hatred of his
role in the occupying army. The drama involves headlong romance and
betrayal, contempt and revenge, which erupt in cinematic tableaux of a
turbulent, Tintoretto-like twisting of form and expression—all amplified
by a soundtrack relying heavily on the exaltations of Bruckner’s Seventh
Symphony.

“Manufactured Landscapes”

Photograph by Zeitgeist Films / Everett

The photographer Edward Burtynsky travelled the world in quest of
industrial enormities. In the 2006 documentary “Manufactured
Landscapes,” the filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal follows in Burtynsky’s
footsteps and observes him at work to film—with a cinematographic
sensibility to rival the photographer’s style—places that the developed
world ravages and overwhelms with factory production and fabricated
waste. Baichwal’s long takes of Chinese electronics factories suggest a
level of regimentation and uniformity that seems futuristic and
dystopian; she looks closely at groups of subsistence garbage-gleaners
who trawl through dumps of a virtually geographical scale; and her wide
shots of the organized transport, by Bangladeshi laborers, of detritus
from oil tankers capture a seemingly lunar desolation. With her
aesthetic of proliferating geometrical detail on a colossal scale, she
evokes a world being thrown out of whack with the hypnotic allure of
material pleasures.